Thoughts on book publishing, editing, contemporary poetry, dementia, administrative memos, and teaching by the editor of Tinfish Press.

Friday, May 27, 2016

Simone Weil 30

We have to try to
cure our faults by attention, and not by will. I
looked down at the First Folio's open page and read, “to fleep
perchance to dream.” When a
dyslexic businessman looks at street signs, he sees letters but not
where they belong. His only order, memorized. My student's sentences
flit from hurt to hurt like hummingbirds. I ask him to look at what
he's leaving, but that's for a later age, after the slowing down of
synapses
(and their
attendant asps). The dream included snakes, but they were shedding
skin rather than flashing it. Earth
is covered with our molting: shell casings, bird shit, flat tires, a
pile of wood where a single-wall house fell
in on itself. To attend to
this is not to reverse animation, turn tragedy into farce. It's
to rest in the particular moment of our dying. The envelope arrived
from Thailand with hardly any address on it: my name and place of
work. Ithi's memory book; flip it either way and he smiles. Dead “by
his own hand” at 33 on this
Good Friday. I fucking
hate symbolism.